Relocation! Relocation! Relocation!

At some point in the nearish future, much of the Maldive Islands will slip beneath the sea, large chunks of a nation swallowed up by the rising waters of global warming. Alarmed and increasingly desperate, the country's young president has an audacious plan: To buy a new homeland for his people. It's epic. It's borderline crazy. Can it possibly work?

It's 5 a.m., the tremulous hour, and I'm reading by lamplight at the tiny hotel-room desk when the predawn adhan, the Muslim prayer song, begins. The five-times-daily serenade, beautifully sung, is one of my favorite things about Male, capital of the Maldives. That and the absence of dogs, which are banned throughout this Islamic republic. Not that I don't love dogs. It's just that there's no room for them here, and it's an undeniable relief not to see them dodging traffic and starving on the margins. It occurs to me, in that dark hour when no dog howls, that it might be a similar relief to be done with wildlife as well. Just get it over with. Last night I had coffee with a local cleric, Ibrahim Nasrullah, who told me that every night a great tidal wave rises up in the sea and begs God's permission to destroy the sinners on shore. But God in his mercy holds it back another day. This morning I feel it out there, the dark smothering force coiled to strike, and hear the singer singing what a brinkman's game life has always been.

Obviously, I suffer from mal de Male, which most visitors to the Maldives—the Maldives of stilted huts and palm-shaded luxury—avoid by never setting foot in the capital. Here the paved-paradise all-human future is now; it's down to two: God and man. (I exaggerate; there are pigeons.) Maybe the singer is celebrating that exclusive relationship with Allah, but he sounds like a soul-sore troubadour to me, like Hank warbling of lonesome whistles. Resist the temptation to despair, he seems to sing, while his melody slips hopelessness under the door. The feeling is scary and new—both personal and world significant, Yeats's "The Second Coming" coming true.

I'm here in the Maldives to write about the end of the world, or at least the end of this world, and climate change, that big bummer blackening the horizon. You know the story. Science says: This thing's coming, deal with it. And the president of the Maldives—the first democratically elected president—Mohamed Nasheed, is attempting to deal. On the eve of his inauguration last November, Nasheed announced his plan to begin investing millions each year in a sovereign-wealth fund that would go toward the purchase of a new homeland—an insurance policy in the event that rising seas force a mass evacuation of these low-lying isles.

Remote from anywhere (the closest neighbor is India, 300 miles to the northeast), this archipelago of 1,190 islands in the Indian Ocean was nonetheless once at the center of world commerce—a lifesaving oasis in the liquid desert. Where the original inhabitants came from remains a mystery, but by around 300 b.c., when mariners from the East and West first met here, the shrewd middlemen of the Maldives were already provisioning the spice trade with fresh water and dried fish, amassing profit enough to become bankers and financiers. Buddhists for more than a millennium, the Maldivians were subjects of a Muslim sultanate for the next 800 years. For most of the latter half of the twentieth century, the state was a de facto dictatorship, but in November 2008, the Maldives emerged from a decades-long struggle to become the world's newest democracy. It now confronts the possibility—some scientists say certainty—of becoming the world's first modern sovereign nation to be forced to evacuate due to a man-made environmental catastrophe.

The long-term outlook is bleak indeed: At a major U.N. conference on the emissions crisis in March, scientists warned that the Arctic ice is melting faster than previous measurements indicated, and that sea-level increases would be more severe and occur sooner than had been predicted by the 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change. That prognostication of a half-meter rise by the end of the century has risen to a full meter, more than sufficient to inundate the Maldives, where the average elevation is, you guessed it, a mere meter above the waterline.

So the president's plan may not be as hysterical as it sounds. The Maldives hopes to raise the exodus fund from its billion-dollar-a-year tourism industry, much of it of the $1,500-a-night TomKat and Brangelina variety. In this, the Maldives is caught in a classic catch-22. The country desperately depends upon the carbon-powered prosperity that is heating up the atmosphere and raising sea levels. So do we all. But we high-and-dry continentals can postpone thinking the unthinkable while our politicians tinker with the sputtering economic engine. Nasheed believes the Maldivians can't just wait and see how the repair turns out. Seen through their frontline lens, the world is on the brink of a tremendous reshuffling, a reorg beyond comprehension and prediction.

No wonder, then, that Nasheed can seem schizophrenic when faced with global economic psychosis, in which the economy and environment, actually two facets of one entity—like Jekyll and Hyde—pretend not to recognize each other. The president announced in March that the Maldives would become the world's first carbon-neutral nation by 2020. Though the cost of the proposed refit—155 wind turbines, half a square kilometer of rooftop solar panels, biomass plants burning coconut husks—would exceed the expected revenue for the homeland fund, it makes twisted sense for the young leader to promote both. Meanwhile, with the all-important U.N. climate-change conference coming up this month in Copenhagen, Nasheed hopes to make as big a splash as possible. He has directed his cabinet to learn to scuba dive, and on October 17 he convened the world's first underwater parliament. His mix of Barnum and Cassandra is pure "negative capability" in the Keatsian sense: the worst-case scenario abiding with the best.

Mitigate or migrate, as one Maldivian put it. If migrate it be, Nasheed has mentioned Sri Lanka, India, and Australia as possible landing zones in his leap of faith. What I'm wondering is, which Maldives does Nasheed hope can be transported across the sea? In my two weeks here, I've seen many. There's the urban Maldives of Male, and the Maldives of the famous resorts. There's the traditional Maldives of fishermen and their families, and then there's Hulhumale—the new Male—a vast artificial island, as yet largely unoccupied, but probably the best real backup plan. I have an appointment to speak with President Nasheed about his epic vision—not today, but surely tomorrow; bear with us, Mr. McMahon, so many demands on his attention—and in the meantime I've been seeing a little of all these Maldives. But mostly Male, where the bulk of the potential refugees-to-be live, a precarious three feet above the sea.

It smacks you the moment you step off the ferry from the airport—the teeming Times Square busyness, the sweltering equatorial heat. But Male is hardly the worst place in the world, simply one of the most crowded, with nearly 150,000 people cheek by jowl on a single square mile of concrete right up to the water's edge. Yet locals bear the crowding with stoicism and preternatural patience, which a visitor must try to muster at once. It is largely a slum, true, but it's not a festering slum. Male can dump its sewage directly into the sea and float its garbage, barge by barge, to a place just over the horizon—"Rubbish Island," Thilafushi, a bizarro Maldives.

So it's a little grubby, Male is, a little gritty, but with some clean well-lighted cafés, at least one upscale restaurant, and an entrepreneurial middle class running innumerable little shops—though here appearances may be deceiving. "You see the young men on their shiny new motorbikes, with a clean shirt and tie, but they go home where three generations are living in one room," says Adam Maniku, the minister of housing, transport, and environment. I witnessed this myself when I visited the apartment of an elderly painter, N. D. Manik, whose laminated guides to the fish of the Maldives are sold in the tourist shops. Relations just kept arriving—his son, his son's sons, mothers, wives—like a Marx Brothers routine.

What with the heat and the crowds and the garbage—and the president's blindsiding pronouncements—most Maldivians already consider environmental disaster a basic fact of their lives. "I don't talk about sea level rising but about the destruction of the world," Minister Maniku told me, settling in for a leisurely ramble. Portly, avuncular—a bit like a Maldivian Ernest Borgnine—he was not at all gloomy in manner, however bleak his conclusions about mankind. Maniku discoursed on the superior nature of the Maldivian gene pool, selected from the most intrepid sea voyagers; on the true nature of prayer; and on the fatal flaw of capitalism, the fathomless greed of men. "How rich do you want to be?" he asked rhetorically. "Two billion dollars? Four billion? People don't even know. A full belly, that should be enough." As for the sovereign-wealth fund, he claimed to have championed the idea a decade before Nasheed. Now he wasn't even sure the Maldives needed sovereign borders. Did a tsunami respect borders? Give everyone $300,000 and a passport, that was his alternative plan, and it envisioned a different, more mobile type of nationhood, one based on the Maldives' unique language, Dhivehi, and the Internet. "People can live in a virtual Maldives," he said. They wouldn't have to be physically present on the islands, but they would invest there: "They'd be shareholders of Maldives, Inc." At any rate, whatever sea change the landscape might suffer, the Maldives needn't be abandoned completely. A well-adapted Male could be maintained as headquarters, with Maldivians and tourists alike still coming to dive and see the beautiful atolls that remained above water. "This is a fantastic place," Maniku concluded with a sigh. "But we are ruining it slowly."

Ali Rilwan, founder of Male's homegrown environmental NGO, Bluepeace, may be the foremost expert on that slow ruination, but he strongly favors mitigation over migration. Rather than try to save all 200 of the inhabited islands, he believes the population could be consolidated on the archipelago's seven highest ones, the most propitious sites for augmentation by dredging. Rilwan, amid much chuckling and betel-nut chewing, enthused about the antierosion properties of trees and was as inexhaustibly wonkish as Maniku had been philosophical. I learned that the Maldivians refused to call a crow a bird. That the country had its own distinct style of coconut-tree climbing. That elfin beings with one foot longer than the other were frequently seen on the remotest atolls, and that children sometimes disappeared mysteriously, only to reappear days later, happy and well cared for but remembering nothing of their journeys. Another cup of coffee?

Between cups I worked the waterfront and the fish market, where the Male crowd is most frenetic, with the added challenge of slippery footing. In a very unscientific survey, I concluded that the fishermen know something is wrong with the weather, but it's Allah's business, not theirs. Sad but true, but what are you gonna do? And most succinctly put: We don't give a fuck, but if there is a sovereign-wealth fund, the government will steal the money like it always does.

I'm practically an old Male hand by now, and I have a route I follow, cautiously poking my head out the door of my hotel, looking both ways so I'm not run over at the start. Ten paces toward the sea, the hotel's alley tees into a proper road at a blind curve—a particle accelerator for Maldivian dudes on motor scooters. It's a tricky road to cross; the traffic just keeps materializing out of nowhere, and you can't hear it coming because the scooter sound is pervasive, like living in a blender. But in this dry capital, nearly all the drivers are young and sober—just caffeinated and nicotinized—and they'll dodge you if you can't dodge them. So on across Boduthakurufaanu Magu (alias Marine Drive) to the ferry docks, where little covered dhonis—the traditional wooden boats with gracefully upswept prows—ply the airport trade twenty-four—seven, and thence clockwise along the seawall walkway with the general peristalsis, a bobbing sea of folks. Wherever you are in Male, it feels like the big game has just let out and everyone is hustling to beat the traffic. But there's no game, and no respite on the streets from eighteen hours of rush hour.

Along the seawall, I fall in line behind power-walking women in veils and the ubiquitous young men walking arm in arm like lovers. The wall, fortified by tetrapods—interlocking concrete structures like four-foot toy jacks—was built with the help of Japanese engineers after an unusually strong storm surge inundated Male in 1987. Nonetheless, the city suffered extensive flooding during the tsunami of 2004, which killed eighty-two Maldivians on other islands and caused $400 million of damage, destruction from which the country has yet to recover. The island of Kandholhudhoo, for instance, which had been a mini Male—3,600 people on 4.4 hectares, ramshackle dwellings from shore to shore—was obliterated, the populace evacuated, many still awaiting new permanent homes. However ineffective, the wall gives Male an embattled look, and indeed it and the nation as a whole are at war with the sea, now as never before.

My daily stroll takes me to the eastern point of Male, where multitudes gather each morning to watch the sunrise. Between a makeshift surfers' club and the spiraling monument to the tsunami victims, there's a vestigial fingernail of beach and a quality surf break. Here or near about, in the year 1153, the hero Abdul Barakat Yoosuf al Barbary defeated the sea demon Rannamaari in a battle of words and wills. According to the legend, the beast would splash ashore once a month, when the moon was full and the tide at its highest, demanding as sacrifice the kingdom's most beautiful maiden. Barakat, an intrepid Berber from distant Arabia, approached the king of the Maldives with a plan to defeat the monster. Disguised as the sacrificial virgin, he kept vigil on the shore all night reading aloud from the Koran, imposing the order of Islam on the sloshing, slurping chaos of the sea. The king, astonished and impressed to find Barakat alive, converted his realm to the faith of Mohammed, and so the Maldives has remained ever since.

Nearly a millennium later, the hero Mohamed Nasheed—known affectionately as "Anni"—defeated the land monster Maumoon Gayoom with the secular creed of multiparty democracy. It was a comparably momentous victory of belief against chaos, a turning point in the history of the Maldives of equal significance. By all credible accounts, Gayoom was a corrupt and brutal dictator who, during his thirty-year reign, silenced all opposition with his National Security Service and rampant imprisonment and torture. A master of Orwellian doublespeak, the dictator strutted upon the world stage as an environmentalist while befouling the once pristine Maldives with ill-conceived and unregulated construction projects that enriched first his family and then his cronies. He bemoaned the poverty of his people while living lavishly himself—gold-plated toilet and all. And he kept the dirty little secrets secret by limiting contact between Maldivians and tourists under the pretext that he was protecting the people's piety from "cultural contamination."

Nasheed, now 42, opened the battle in 1990 at age 23 with anti-Gayoom critiques published in the magazine Sangu, which he co-founded despite dire risk of torture. Sangu would be banned within the year, and young Nasheed accused of sedition and hauled off to jail for the first of twenty-three times. He would be beaten, served food laced with broken glass and laxatives, and confined for months in medieval shackles; eventually, Amnesty International recognized him as a prisoner of conscience. The flashpoint event in the long struggle was the 2003 torture death of an obscure prisoner in one of the island gulags, which led to rioting in Male and the burning of government buildings. In 2005, Nasheed led a nonviolent mass sit-in on the anniversary of the protests—and was jailed yet again. In and out of prison, or operating in exile from Sri Lanka and the UK, Nasheed and the Maldivian Democratic Party gradually marshaled enough international support to embarrass Gayoom into reform.

Even with free elections, though, few believed the MDP could defeat Gayoom, the patriarch and emplar of the status quo. But Nasheed had literally written the book on Dhivehi polity, first in his head during eighteen months of solitary confinement and then in a two-week burst of composition when he had (temporarily) regained his freedom. He understood the feudal nature of Male, its control by powerful clans, and knew that if he could turn the vote of one influential member in each, the whole extended family might well go along. In any event, the election was a near thing, with Gayoom and his Dhivehi Rayyithunge party garnering 40 percent of the vote.

So in 2009, the Republic of the Maldives found itself with a radical young president, Obama-esque in his charisma. (A bit of local wit asks, How is Nasheed like Obama? Both have two young daughters; both overthrew dictators.) Like Obama, Nasheed inherited a fiscal crisis—indeed, a laundry list of crises—and has been walking the belt-tightening walk, divesting the office of president of its most conspicuous ornamental bling: proposing to offer the presidential yacht for sale on eBay, for instance, and moving from palace to bungalow. A former journalist and satirical novelist (five of his books are still banned in the Maldives—surely a world's first, for a sitting president to have his own books banned in his own country), he penned an eloquent piece for the International Herald Tribune in which he restated his proposal for a new homeland but warned that if the Maldives went under, it would be amid a general climatic apocalypse threatening the entire planet. "The Maldives," he wrote, "is the canary in the world's carbon coal mine."

Save the cheerleader, save the world? Perhaps so. As Nasheed pointed out in the Tribune, the migration of a few hundred thousand Maldivian refugees may be a matter of indifference to a preoccupied industrial world, but wait until everyone else shows up. The trickle has already begun, with high seas nibbling away at the Pacific islands of Tuvalu and Kiribati, and hundreds of their displaced persons migrating to New Zealand, currently the only nation accepting environmental refugees. But the nightmare awaits along Asia's river deltas and coasts, where rising seas could shift billions. After us, says Nasheed, the flood.

Migrate or mitigate. But how? According to Amjad Abdulla, the Maldives' director general of the environmental ministry and chief climate-reparations negotiator, the country's National Adaptation Program of Action—its relatively inexpensive to-do list of shore-protection and island-elevation projects—"should've been implemented yesterday." Relatively is the operative term here: The Maldives can't afford to do much without assistance. For two decades, the Maldives and some forty other vulnerable, financially strapped nations in the Alliance of Small Island States have been petitioning the world community—especially, of course, the chief polluters, the industrial nations. They have filled out all the forms, described the mitigation needs, and detailed the desired projects.

"But none of the projects is yet to be implemented," Abdulla said. A young man, and painfully earnest, surrounded by shelves of well-documented inaction, he seemed at his soft-spoken wit's end. "We are begging people to finance these projects—and that's under legally binding agreements of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. We are seeing our partners fail to commit to these promises. And that's a scary scenario. This is our home, and we have a right to be here."

This may be true, but just as a tsunami recognizes no borders, the marketplace honors no rights. The Maldives, and especially Male, is already an economic disaster. In this the sea itself mitigates—so far as beauty ever can. It provides relief from claustrophobia. The leisure to contemplate its moods takes the sting from idleness. You see the dhonis and the tuna boats, the muscular speedboats blasting across the atoll, carving deep wakes, and seaplanes crisscrossing the sky, bearing the rich and VIPs to the secluded islands that dot the horizon, and you believe that Male is the center of something vital. Increasingly, it is not.

On my daily walk through the "reclaimed" area, where Male has made some horizontal space for itself by dredge and fill—a pleasant enough, if dusty, seaside park—I pass by thousands who seem not to be relaxing, exactly, so much as waiting for something to happen. Many of these waiters and watchers are guest workers, about 35,000 of them, mostly Bangladeshi, who sit together on the ground in large groups looking decidedly unhappy. They do most of the dirty work in the Maldives. Any solvent Male family will have two or three servants, or so I'm told, which complicates the unemployment situation. There is little enough work to be had, and plenty of outsiders who will do it for next to nothing. This is the economy, broadly understood: There are fishermen and shopkeepers and government employees, and then there's everybody else, subsisting off trickle-down from the resort industry. At any rate, day or night, this park is packed, mostly with young men doing fuck-all except smoking good American cigarettes, and if it exploded into violent anarchy I would not be the least bit surprised.

The Maldives is a microcosm of the unsustainable society—running out of space, running out of potable water, running out of time. It imports nearly everything and exports only trash (recyclables, to India) and a dwindling catch of tuna. In Male population density has doubled since 1980, and with 75 percent of the demographic under 35, it has the potential to do so again in short order. Deputy home minister Abdullah Waheed describes the youth of the Maldives as "caught between radical Islam and the drug culture" with "no acceptable forms of entertainment available." This pervasive boredom has produced 30,000 drug addicts (with treatment facilities for 200), according to a report by the president's Maldivian Democratic Party. Nasheed has compared the Maldives to Saudi Arabia—"They have oil, we have tourism"—and like an OPEC nation, the Maldives has a toxic relationship with its primary resource.

"Dependence on one industry is always a risk," says Ahmed Shakir, CEO of Sun Investments, part of Sun Hotels and Resorts, which owns four posh properties. When I met with Shakir at his office in Male, he spoke with surprising frankness about the role that tourism has played in shaping the Maldives. "Going off like firecrackers," Shakir said of the resort boom under Gayoom, when some ninety previously uninhabited islands were transformed into paradises for the rich. Where fishing used to be the mainstay of life, tourism offered higher pay and easier work. The dhonis and their crews were recruited for diving or tourist transport, and at a certain tipping point, islanders either worked for the resorts or left for Male.

"Tourism is the goose that laid the golden egg," Shakir said. "The thought that this will not last forever has not yet registered."

Indeed, with the world economy recoiling from one shock after another, the luxury biz is looking particularly shaky. And while the stats for Maldives tourism—down 7 percent for the year—are far from cataclysmic, it's hard to experience the sheer weight of idle humanity in Male without thinking what nobody's saying: If the tourism industry collapses, people will starve.

Huvafen Fushi—Dream Island—is the sort of intimate, high-end resort that has the aesthetic wisdom to understate its extravagances and stay out of the way of the spectacular natural beauty for which the Maldives is justly famous. The contrast with Male is absolute and momentarily disorienting. You soon adapt. Arriving by speedboat, you see only a modest well-built dock, a fringe of snow white sand, and the emerald green of the coconut-palm grove. Shaded paths lead you through gardens to the amenities, which include a wine cellar and tasting room where you can spend up to $39,000 for a single bottle. On a day trip, I was shown to a plushly appointed waterside suite to freshen up and then treated to a session in the underwater spa. Oiled, rubbed, and soothed to somnolence by a Thai masseuse plying traditional Maldivian coconut-palm-wood massage tools, I tottered off in a terry-cloth robe for reflection time in a curtained aquarium chamber suffused with turquoise light. There I sprawled on a comfy window seat, munched some fruit, and admired the brilliantly colored fish as they flitted among spurs of live coral that have been wedged into a substrate of coral rock some dozen feet below the surface.

The setting was right out of Cubby Broccoli, if not Ian Fleming, and had I been Mr. Bond, my masseuse would've poked her pretty head through the curtains and, coyly biting her lip, leapt coltishly onto the chaise longue. A few double entendres later and I would've coad a key bit of intel as to the identity and location of the archvillain—some Hai Tyde or S'more Calor—whose diabolical plan is to drown the world as we know it, beginning with these treasured isles.

Alas for reality. The villain is all of us, helplessly entangled in the global web of getting and spending. Still—as old Adam said—the fruit was good, and the uncanny view, shot through with sunlight shading out to deeper blues, invited a meditation on the new Atlantis, which may well be the fate of these Maldives. Dark as the long-term prognosis may be, the devil is in the short-term details.

Mass evacuation may be half a century (or more) away, but resorts like Huvafen Fushi are fighting the effects of climate change right now. The devastating El Niño of 1998 killed 70 to 90 percent of the coral in the northern Maldivian atolls. Biophilia and aesthetics aside, coral reefs are natural levees, the first line of defense against storm surges. When an island loses its "house reef," it begins to waste away. The harbor-building spree of the Gayoom government altered and intensified currents, increasing sedimentation and further smothering coral and carrying away beaches.

Half of the islands here have already suffered major erosion, with beaches disappearing and homes falling into the sea. The weather, too, has begun to deteriorate on a day-to-day basis. The thousand-year-old weather calendar—the nakaiy—handed down through generations of Maldivian fishermen began to break down about twenty years ago. The rainy season no longer reliably brings rain, and the once clockwork monsoons have been replaced by a chaos of unpredictable winds—which also drive the engine of erosion.

Huvafen Fushi is battening down its invaluable beaches with sandbags and a coral-replenishment program overseen by a full-time marine biologist. It's a battle of millimeters—millimeters of coral growth versus millimeters of sea-level rise—the outcome of which is very much up in the air, or underwater.

Back in male, I had a message from the president's office saying he would definitely not be able to see me today, though tomorrow looked good. So I took some budget excursions, beginning with a fifty-cent ferry ride to Hulhumale, the man-made island, which is vast and remarkably unshaded under the equatorial sun. Built by dredge and fill on top of a six-kilometer-long shallow lagoon, Hulhumale suffers by comparison with a natural island, man and his machines being unable to accomplish in a matter of years what nature wrought over eons. Next to Male, though, it's a beauty spot, with a seawall protecting only one side and a "natural" beach on the other. Alas, the construction of apartment buildings bears the dictator Gayoom's stamp of grandiosity and impracticality. Multistoried and small-windowed, they appear somewhat Stalinesque stacked along the straight-edged streets, the perfect future breeding ground for sweat-drenched anomie and gangland activity. Already some of the walls had been tagged with graffiti, HOTTIES.COM predominating.

Most importantly, though, Hulhumale rises nine feet above sea level, and for the teeming population of Male it offers blessed space. What it lacks is financing. Potential new residents are being chosen by lottery, but few can come up with the $8,000 down payment to move in. This has occasioned protests in the capital—peaceful so far. But this stalled migration, due to a lack of cash, to an island visible with the naked eye from Male raises serious doubts about the sovereign-wealth fund and the organizational nightmare of moving everybody overseas. The bottom line is: The Maldives has no money. I don't have any money. Do you have any money? Does anybody these days?

What we all have is plenty of trash and nowhere to put it. I tossed a note from the front desk (I'd been bumped from the guest list for a speedboat trip with the president, but as soon as he returned…), grabbed a bottled water from the minibar, and hopped on a ferry for Thilafushi, Rubbish Island. A little ways out of Male on the placid blue lagoon, I could see the plume of dirty smoke arising from the part of Thilafushi that eternally smolders. I was dreading flies and stench, but where we docked wasn't too bad. This was the "finished" part of the island, dating back to 1992, hard-packed and supporting a few trees, not so different from a natural industrial park, which is Thilafushi's other identity, a place of warehouses and small-scale shipyards. I saw no do not litter signs.

I had to hike a fair distance, through steadily declining real estate, to be appalled. Here the newest acreage of Thilafushi was being born, bulldozers shifting mountains of plastic bottles and mashing the multifarious products of the opposable thumb and the neocortex into an indistinguishable mass. Nothing you couldn't see anywhere else in the world. But it was the contrast of the gorgeous turquoise of the lagoon with the rubbish going in, the beauty that had been, that hurt the eyes. It's an emergency dump, a fuck-it kind of place, everything going in unsorted and unprotected—a toxic time bomb for the food chain, no doubt.

But then the Maldivians were leaving anyway. Someday. Maybe.

When at last I am summoned to the presidential building (slated to be converted to the Maldives' first university), I share a cab, and a half-hour time slot, with a husband-and-wife team from Brazil's Globo-TV. No matter. Everyone has the same basic question: Did Nasheed really mean what he said, or was the Maldivian canary singing for foreign aid? Or both.

The cab drops us off at the back entrance of a big stone building, unremarkable from the rear except for a single armed guard keeping watch through a slot in a pillboxlike structure beside a plain green door. A young factotum confirms our appointment and lets us into the marble-floored interior courtyard looking out through ornate iron gates onto the hubbub of Boduthakurufaanu Magu and the sparkling sea beyond. We follow another underling to a conference room, nearly bare of furniture but richly carpeted and paneled with gleaming hardwood. The Brazilians set up their lights, and we chat about celebrity interviews. Meryl Streep was the best. She gave you more than you asked for.

On the minute, Mohamed Nasheed strides briskly in, dapper in a navy blue suit, whippet thin, and with a surprisingly musical voice that registers his pleasure to meet us with its highest notes. He takes his seat in the glare of the TV light, looking like a bright doctoral candidate who's confident he can field whatever questions the committee throws at him.

Mr. President, what the fuck's up with this sovereign-wealth fund? Have you given up believing that the rest of the world will take action to avert this disaster?

For a moment I think he's referencing Ranaamaari, the legendary sea demon. But he means, simply, that the damage has been done: "Even if we stop carbon emissions now, it's going to be very difficult to reverse the situation."

He carries on, in a Clintonian paragraph, hitting all the major notes of the Maldives' environmental crisis. True, the bottom line is at least fifty years down the pike: "An eventuality that has to be taken care of by other presidents, not me. It will involve my grandchildren." But responsible politicians have to think about grandchildren, and a Maldivian politician has to think about his grandchildren sitting in a tent as environmental refugees. "The question is whether the world can look after 1 or 2 billion people at that time. Increasingly, we see that no one wants to have them. It's understandable. Everyone has to look out for their own resources." But no, he has not lost faith in the rest of the world. The sovereign-wealth fund is simply a way of being reasonable, practical.

As for the price tag on relocation, Nasheed reframes the question—and the potential climate reparations from the world community—as a classic insurance issue, referencing Pascal's wager and probability. It was a matter of understanding the pattern. He believes that continued improvement in computer simulations of climate change will show the new pattern: who is at risk, where, and when. "Anyone interested in saving for a rainy day will have to understand how much rain there will be. Then you know how much to save," Nasheed says. "And when you spread it over a hundred years, the amount you have to save is not so much."

But, at whatever cost, could a people buy land and move to it and still be a nation?

Nasheed smiles happily. Has he not spent years in prison and in exile wondering what exactly the Maldives is, what it can become, why it is worth his life to save?

"This is very interesting," he says, "because you go into the question of the state, the nation. What is a nation? Why the nation-state? The nation-state is so entwined with the development of the novel, of literature." A nation is its words, he believes, its stories, as much as its physical boundaries. In exile he memorized the names of all 1,190 Maldivian islands—an ercise he doesn't recommend for anyone. But every little island, every shallow reef, has its name, its myths. These words have come from somewhere; they derive from connections elsewhere. They are transportable, and perhaps the nation with them. "Movement doesn't, in my mind, necessarily lose the state. The state of Israel is a twentieth-century example."

But just as he is waxing most philosophical, Nasheed demurs. "These are not questions for people like me," he says. He wants the nation to survive, and he believes it will, though how it will be defined and what space it will occupy, only time will tell. The immediate crisis is consolidating its fragile democracy. The Maldives, he insists, will not survive without democracy. Without democracy there can be no sovereign-wealth fund or any other effective response to climate change. The environmental crisis is, at heart, a crisis of governance. The Bush administration's rejection of the Kyoto agreement, for example, was a case of the wrong government at the wrong time.

The Brazilians ask how the Maldivians have responded to the news of the president's relocation plan, and then I ask how their newfound freedom of expression might affect the environmental movement in the Maldives—and Nasheed's answers to both questions are strikingly similar.

The Maldivians have been astounded by the sovereign-wealth fund, just as they were astonished to find themselves suddenly living in a democracy where they could say whatever they felt—and they had to learn to speak up. "They are able to say whatever they want with regard to the environment. If we are doing anything wrong, they can come out with it. And we are going to do many things wrong. We are bound to dredge many places. We are bound to destroy a fair amount of nature. But the more there is opposition, the more the government has to be careful about what they do. I like swimming, I like the reefs. I grew up swimming every day, and I grew up skin-diving. I don't want to see the reefs die. Everyone might not have similar sentiments about the reefs. Freedom of expression is important to save them. The civil society has to come up in saving the reefs. Governments are not going to do that. Governments will only do what governments have to do."

Whatever the question, Nasheed keeps coming back to democracy—the urgency of nurturing Maldivian democracy. After all, he has seen what a dictatorship would not do. It would not do anything, because the people could not demand that it do anything.

And how about that Maldivian democracy, the Maldivian miracle, a Muslim nation making a peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy. Is it not a beacon to the world?

"Well, I hope so," Nasheed says, his voice rising with emotion, underscoring the fragility of that hope. "I was hoping people would understand. We are very down. When we came up with the movement, there was some engagement; we had a sympathetic hearing from Britain and the U.S. But we've had the elections, and our financial affairs are in a very bad state. But we are not getting any assistance from anyone. We are having to fend for ourselves, so we are cutting down on things that we can. India has been very generous in assisting us, but other than India, no one is interested in the Maldives. No one."

Several months later, in September, Nasheed will address the U.N. climate change summit in New York, giving vent to the frustrations of his country. "Once or twice a year, we are invited to attend an important climate-change event such as this one—often as a keynote speaker. On cue, we stand here and tell you just how bad things are. We warn you that unless you act quickly and decisively, our homeland and others like it will disappear before the rising sea, before the end of this century. We in the Maldives desperately want to believe that one day our words will have an effect, and so we continue to shout them, even though, deep down, we know that you are not really listening."

Today, the president's aide makes cutting signs with his hand. Our time is up. Nasheed rises, apologizing for the brevity, pressing business, so much to be done. The Brazilians wonder if they could just follow him out with the camera, maybe shoot him looking out at the sea. And so we all file out into the courtyard, and the president allows himself to be directed to the gate where he can gaze through the bars at the lagoon. The scooter traffic on Boduthakurufaanu Magu shoots past; the pedestrian river rushes by on the sidewalk, a few beginning to recognize the youthful figure behind the gate, stopping to gawk, a small crowd gathering, the flowing sea of people, diverted slightly, still pouring by. The Maldivians have a word for the phenomenon—kandumathielhia—when you feel as if your dhoni is hurtling along over the waves at high speed, but somehow you are stuck fast, getting nowhere. It is the sea that moves.

BUCKY McMAHON is the author of Night Diver, a collection of travel stories.

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